Last week I attended the Oxford Desert Conference, to bang the drum about work my colleagues and I are doing in the Turkana basin (stay tuned for more on that). I came away reminded of some important ideas that I’d not thought about for a long time.

The stand-out paper for me was about geology and cities. Richard Walker, a geologist who’s carried out long-term research in Iran, showed that several of the country’s cities are located at points of seismic instability. The places where you find the most people, in other words, also tend to be places with the highest risk of earthquakes.

Why? Because that’s also where groundwater is most likely to seep up through fissures in rock. And in arid or semi-arid parts of the world, the major limiting factor for life is water.

This phenomenon – the coincidence of settlements, springs, and seismic instability – is something I’d encountered 20 years ago, during my days as an archaeologist. From a season working on a field survey in north-central Turkey, one of the things that I remember most clearly is that scatters of pottery (the remnants of long-buried settlements) were most common along geological fault-lines.

This stuck with me because I recognized that it was emblematic of an important dimension of human experience that lies beyond ordinary perception. The choice of where to live (one of the most important decisions we make) is rarely one we make independently. And these communal decisions often expose us to substantial risks – risks that are often difficult to quantify, but real ones nonetheless.

Here, as often, global warming comes to mind. Like the tempo of earthquakes, the time horizon on which climate change plays out is longer than the one we ordinarily think with. Perhaps our brains aren’t wired to deal with slow-burning problems like these, as George Marshall has argued. [1]

That we’re vulnerable and short-sighted isn’t news. But we’re better equipped to make decisions (choosing where to live, or how to mitigate the risks of climate change) if we recognize the constraints we operate under.

As Jerome Bruner has written, “We cannot adapt to everything, and in designing a way to the future, we would do well to examine what we are and what our limits are.” [2]